Once again the Weekend Contributor’s well is dry and I’m really running behind this week, so I thought this weekend I’d put up a couple of posts from the past blogs I’ve created. A lot of people don’t know about my blogs before this one, but I started blogging back in 2009. I thought today I’d write about the first blog I ever did and post up some links and thoughts about that and then tomorrow I’ll post about the other ones. All of them were done when I was living in New York and the very first blog I did was called The Marty Wombacher Show.
-----------------
The Marty Wombacher Show
Starting and finishing dates: The first post went up on May 4 2009 and the last post was January 11th, 2010.
A short synopsis of what the blog was all about: I thought it would be an online magazine with different departments all updated on a daily basis. In the beginning there were eight different sections that got updated at different times of the day. I thought this would keep people coming back and checking in throughout the day. I didn’t realize back then that people these days have a short attention span when it comes to looking at things online and they didn’t want to keep coming back and searching for new updates.
The blog started out with big numbers because I had emailed a link in the beginning to my large mailing list of contacts. It quickly dwindled down as the weeks wore on. One constant criticism was that it was hard to find the new updates because you had to click on the links to find them. In the end I had an audience of about 25 to 50 people every day and realized I needed to totally change this format and try something new. One thing I’ve learned through the years is that if something fails you need to stand back and look at that failure and try to figure out how to improve on it.
The one section that worked: I did one section that wasn’t updated a lot called, “Photoblog.” What I did in that section was go somewhere and take photos and interact with people. This always got a bump in hits and I realized that this was something that people liked.
A good example of this type of post is when I went to a book signing by Dee Dee Ramone’s ex-wife, Vera Ramone at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Greenwich Village. I went and got some photos from the book signing including some of me and Vera and that post got a lot of traffic. I realized that maybe going somewhere and documenting a live interaction was appealing to people. A light slowly started to flicker in my head that I needed to try something different in the world of blogging.
Vera Ramone signing my book at Barnes & Noble.
Home Page Art: One thing I am proud of is the Home Page Art that both myself and my friend and brother, “Boris” created for this blog. At first the front page was static with a piece of art I created being the focal point of the page, here’s that piece of art.
I soon realized it was boring to people to come and see the same home page every day and it kind of gave the appearance that it hadn’t been updated. So I started changing the art on a daily basis with art like this one below.
This was a lot of work to do a new piece of art every day and I was also trying to update eight sections daily, so I called upon “Boris” to see if he wanted to lend a hand. “Boris” is a Photoshop wizard and a genius at creating online art and he really stepped up to the plate and started to create all the weekday art and I did the updates on the weekend. Here’s just a few of “Boris’s” wonderful and unique creations for the Home Page Art for The Marty Wombacher Show.
You can see all of the Home Page art that both “Boris” and I created by clicking here.
In the end I knew this project was never going to take off. It got frustrating working so hard and only having a few people looking at it every day. I decided to try a totally new approach and the next blog that I created did attract a big audience and kind of changed the course of my life. I’ll write about that and my other blogs tomorrow in part two of this series about my past blogs. We’ll see you all tomorrow!
Related Posts: Artwork by “Boris” Revisited, My Favorite Freelance Feature Article and Fishwrap SMiLE.